DUNIA, MULK, YABARUT
2019
Sculpture: Bronze, olive tree wood, ceramic and bones.
Exhibitions:
‘ARCO 2019 – III Premio Cervezas Alhambra de Arte Emergente’, Madrid.
‘CREAR/SIN/PRISA’, Tabacalera Promoción del Arte, Madrid, 2019.
Dunia, Mulk, Yabarut (Earth, Sky, Spirit) is a reinterpretation of the yamur, an architectural element from Andalusian Granada.
The yamurs are metal structures consisting of 3 spheres attached to a vertical stem, which were placed on the minarets in order to protect mosques from the supernatural.
Remains of ancient yamur have survived to this day hidden in the churches of Granada, reused as weather vanes or lightning rods, sometimes culminated by a cross, thus becoming biographical testimonies of the city.
The protective qualities of the yamur are linked to its divine symbolism, it is said that when the yamurs are of three spheres, they represent the three worlds in which the Islamic divinity is made known: dunia, mulk and yabarut (terrestrial, celestial and spiritual). In the same way, the lightning rods that were incorporated later, come to balance the forces between the same three worlds; earthing, atmosphere and electric current.
Dunia, Mulk, Yabarut is a mixed media forge sculpture that departs from the body of the yamur. Its final morphology is the result of the sum of the protective icons used by the inhabitants of the city of Granada at different periods in history; the yamur, the cross, the lightning rod... It is made of materials that have traditionally been used as a defense mechanism against the supernatural, such as bone, olive wood, baked clay and bronze, which uses increase the apotropaic qualities of the sculpture, and renders it as a powerful talisman.
Dunia, Mulk, Yabarut. A project by Asunción Molinos Gordo
Javier del Campo
In the rich lexicon contributed to the Castilian by the Arabs, not a few terms stand out related to art and architecture. Their fortune has been uneven. Some are of daily use, others are hardly used or have been relegated to a specialized field, when not, simply, they already seem foreign to our language. It could almost be said that their critical capital has run parallel to the preserved memory of the word. In the dictionaries of terms of art and archaeology we can find numerous examples of what I say, and then check the numerous articles in which they appear as protagonists or as a stylistic resource.
When Asunción Molinos Gordo began designing her artistic proposal around the yamur, we also started a small historiographical investigation. The voice has hardly had a presence in our literature. Apart from the glossaries, we can say that only Leopoldo Torres Balbás dealt with them in an article published in 1958 in the Al-Andalus[1] magazine. It meant already then that its conservation had occurred due to the transformation of the minarets of the mosques into bell towers of the Christian churches. He also pointed out that on numerous occasions the poor quality of the supporting constructions broke due to the weight of the bells installed in the minarets, thus ruining the showy auctions that crowned them.[2] The yamur of the Hispanic mosques were strictly known from medieval descriptions and by natural comparison with those preserved in North Africa, until a specimen was found in the Iberian Peninsula that gave rise to the study by Torres Balbás that we quote. The yamur of Alcolea, conserved in the Archaeological Museum of Córdoba, served as a basis for the study of its typology and to identify some other survivors on the roofs of the bell towers. Although the list is not very extensive, it is not necessary to mention here more than some of them, such as that of San Juan de los Reyes in Granada; that of the Cadí mosque, later reused in the church of Santa Ana in Granada and exhibited in the Alhambra Museum; the one of the Church of San Mateo in Lucena or the one of the Convento de la Concepción in Pedroche, Córdoba.
Almost all the descriptions, which accompany the scarce information on the yamur, essentially repeat the one provided by the architect Torres Balbás back in the day: a vertical iron bar attached to the dome that culminated the terrace of the minaret, in which there was inserted an undetermined number of balls made of copper, bronze or brass - sometimes covered in gold and silver - in decreasing size. Having one, two, three and even five balls, there has been speculation about the yamur’s magical and religious function. These balls, identified with apples, are related to the virtue that was attributed to this fruit as holder of snakes. This popular belief would have operated in favor of its maintenance once the mosques were converted into churches, because other types of yamur have not survived. The word itself in Arabic is not without controversy. In Maghrebi Arabic it seems to refer to the "end of the ship's mast", that is, the metallic "bar" itself, and not what it contains, as other minarets are adorned with half-moons, or with a rooster with open wings (as it is said of the one on the Great Mosque of Granada).
When Asunción Molinos Gordo became interested in this element, she wanted to merge into a free-standing sculpture the vindication of memory, popular tradition, the architectural past, the recovery of heritage, the conscious and careful work of craftsmanship, the physical effort and complex theoretical elaboration that every contemporary creation entails. Molinos wanted her yamur to be the result of a calculated geometric operation in which the succession of the different apples kept a harmonious proportion, but above all she wanted the choice of materials to be as respectful of the past as it was bold in its execution. There would be, of course, bronze, assumed in the evocation of the classic yamur, but also ceramic, olive wood and beef bone. And there is also the weather vane and the lightning rod, with which the yamur accentuated its protective relationship with us. As is usual in the artist's work, the contribution of experienced craftsmen becomes crucial. The potter's kiln, the blacksmith's forge and the carpenter's lathe have allowed us to give shape to a device that seems to us very much in line with other works by Molinos.
Nothing seems foreign to a possible symbolic interpretation. Fire in the conformation of the ceramic and metallic balls, earth and root in the eloquent relationship between the olive tree’s stony wood and our cultural environment, perched bone, in the last of the balls, up to the proximity of the weather vane and the lightning rod stylized respectively in a feather and a germinal and ascending branch. A feather like a bolt turns the yamur into a tower of the winds, into a metonymy of the rooster that adorns the weather vanes since, at least, the 9th century. The very base of Asunción Molinos’ sculpture, slightly pyramidal, reminds us of the connections of the lightning rod with the ground rod, at the same time that it invokes the domed shrine on top of which the yamur stood and which served as a terrace for the muezzin.
The artist, as is frequent in her work, once again proposes an exercise of cultural appropriation to speak to us, in fact, about something else. The yamur’s apotropaic condition, its protective effect emanating from above as a salvific fountain, is transformed into a deliberate game between certainty and the unknown. The appearance (the very physical presence of the object), its clear definition in forms and volumes, could distract us and in some way veil the essence of the project. What is attractive about her yamur is that its thaumaturgical function and its relationship with inscrutability and the Kabbalah go far beyond the strict decorative design attached to one or the other religious field. The same can happen with the historical and anthropological references that are in the substratum of the work, which give it a theoretical support and endorse it argumentatively, but which are not strictly the work.
Torres Balbás concluded his article by regretting the loss of the yamur on the bell towers and minarets too long ago, when the decreasing apples dominated the landscape of our towns and cities. The architect said that perhaps the discovery of the Alcolea yamur could help rebuild its appearance and, in some way, he advocated for it. Asunción Molinos has made this exciting journey of cultural translation by proposing a new, contemporary and open reading with a sculpture in which the resounding volumes of the spheres, the very materials with which they have been built, impel an organized and closed reading that challenges the viewer and transports it to a new territory where the incorporeal overcomes the concrete.
[1] Leopoldo Torres Balbás: “El yamur de Alcolea y otros de varios alminares”. Al-Andalus, t. XXIII, p. 323-333, 1958. Available in the digital archive of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid http://oa.upm.es/34217/, consulted on October 10, 2018.
[2] Between 1939 and 1941 Torres Balbás inventoried the minarets preserved in the Iberian Peninsula: “Alminares hispanomusulmanes”. Cuadernos de Arte, Universidad de Granada.
Download text as PDF
